Knowledge base in your language

When you change your language in the topbar — the small pill that reads IT ▾, TH ▾, EN ▾ — the help drawer changes with you. Open any help page in Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, or Spanish and the same article you’d read in English is rendered in the language you picked, with the same screenshots, the same buttons named the same way, the same examples about pizza, carbonara, and Chianti. When a page hasn’t been translated yet, the system falls back to English and shows a small EN badge so you know what you’re looking at.

This page is for the owner or manager who notices the help drawer suddenly speaks their language and wants to understand the rules of the game.

Why this page exists

For most of the platform’s first year, the help drawer was English-only. The rest of the admin — menu items, dish descriptions, modifier labels, ingredient names — already followed your language: change the pill in the topbar from EN to IT and your menu retitles itself. The help drawer didn’t follow. You’d switch to Italian, open a help page, and still be reading English.

That gap is now closed. The wiki you’re reading sits behind the same Language Setting as the rest of the admin. There is no separate “wiki language” toggle to hunt for, no per-page choice. One pill, one setting, everything follows.

The rule

Pick your language once in the topbar. The help drawer and the inline editor render in that language wherever a translation exists, with the English source as a transparent fallback whenever one doesn’t.

You never have to think about whether a particular page has been translated. If the Italian translation exists, you get it. If it doesn’t, you get English — with a small EN badge that signals “this page is the English original, not a translation, on purpose.”

How language selection works

The pill at the top right of the admin shows a two-letter code and a small arrow — IT ▾, TH ▾, EN ▾, ES ▾, VI ▾. Click it to open a dropdown of every language your venue has activated under Settings → Languages. Pick one. Every screen that uses translatable content — menu items, dish descriptions, ingredient names, modifier labels, help pages — switches to that language.

The pill remembers your choice per operator, not per venue. If you’re the owner and you’ve set yourself to Italian, the manager who logs in next from the same venue can pick Spanish for themselves without disturbing your view. If you’ve never explicitly picked a language, the system uses the venue’s primary language (the one set in Settings → Languages → Primary language) as your default.

This is the same selection that drives every multilingual surface in the admin. There is no separate switch for the wiki — the wiki simply rides along.

Fallback and outdated badges

Two small badges may show up on a help page, and each one means something specific.

EN badge — shows in the help drawer’s article list (and at the top of the page) when you’ve picked a non-English language but the page hasn’t been translated into it yet. The system is showing you the English source as a transparent fallback. Nothing is broken; the page exists, it just hasn’t been translated into your language. New pages always start in English and get translated afterwards, so the EN badge is the normal state of a freshly-shipped page for the first day or two.

⚠️ outdated banner — shows at the top of an article when the translation exists but is older than the current English version. This means someone (typically the platform team) edited the English source after the translation was made, so the translation may not reflect those recent edits. The body of the article is still readable and the bulk of the content is still correct, but a paragraph here or there may be out of date. If you’re a super admin, you can re-translate the page in one click; if you’re not, you can read the English version by switching the topbar pill to EN ▾ for a moment, then switch back.

The two badges don’t overlap: a page is either an EN fallback (no translation at all) or a translated page that may be marked ⚠️ outdated (translation exists, just behind). Most pages are neither — they’re up-to-date translations and render with no badge at all.

How to use it

There is nothing to enable. The help drawer reads your language pill on every open. Change the pill, open the drawer — the article you read is in the new language.

If you want to browse what’s available:

Click the ? icon in the topbar (or press the help shortcut) to open the help drawer. The article list on the left shows every page’s title in your current language, with EN badges on the entries that haven’t been translated yet.
Click any entry. The article opens in your language if a translation exists, in English with the EN badge if it doesn’t.
If you see the ⚠️ outdated banner at the top of an article and you’d rather read the up-to-date English text, change the topbar pill to EN ▾ for that page, then switch back when you’re done.

If you want to translate a page yourself rather than wait for the automatic translation, you can open it in the inline editor (Edit here at the bottom of the article) — but in normal use this is reserved for proofreading. The platform produces translations automatically when new English content lands, so you should not need to touch a translation file under normal operation.

What happens behind the scenes

When you change your language pill, the admin remembers your choice on your operator account. The next time you open the help drawer, it asks the help service for the article list and the article body in that language. The help service looks for a translation; if it finds one, it sends it back; if it doesn’t, it sends back the English original with a marker that says “this is the fallback.”

When the platform team writes a new help page in English, the page is published immediately in English — operators in every language see it right away, marked with the EN badge. A separate background step then produces the four translations (Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Spanish) automatically. The translations land on the page over the next minutes, and the EN badge disappears for operators in those languages.

When the platform team edits an existing page in English, the four translations don’t automatically rewrite themselves — they’re still readable, but the ⚠️ outdated banner appears for operators in those languages until a super admin asks for a fresh translation. The reason for this is cost: regenerating four translations on every comma edit would be wasteful and would also throw away any manual proofreading that may have happened on the translation. A super admin decides when the English text has moved enough to justify a refresh.

The translations themselves are saved as separate files in the platform’s source repository — one file per page per language. The system can fall back from a missing translation to English without an extra round-trip, and the language switch is felt instantly when you change the pill.

Worked example

Maria is the head chef at your venue. Her primary working language is Italian, so she’s set her language pill to IT ▾. The owner asks her to check whether the new prep-board feature can mark a recipe as resting before it’s ready.

She opens the help drawer with the ? icon. The article list is in Italian: “Aggiungere un ingrediente all’inventario”, “Come funzionano i prezzi”, “Lavorazioni in corso”, “La regola del fornitore unico”. She finds “Lavorazioni in corso” and clicks it. The article opens in Italian. The buttons mentioned in the article — ▶ Start, → Resting, → Ready, ✓ Log to stock — are quoted in English, exactly as they appear in the admin she’ll use ten seconds later. The narrative around them is Italian.

She scrolls further down the list and clicks “Configurare le campagne online”. The article opens — but at the top of the article list and the article itself there’s a small EN badge. She reads the page in English. It’s a page that was shipped this morning and the Italian translation hasn’t landed yet. By tomorrow it will be in Italian; for now, the English source is the truth.

A week later, she opens the help drawer in Italian and finds an ⚠️ outdated banner at the top of “Inventario — ricezione di una consegna”. The platform team rewrote part of the English version yesterday. The Italian translation she’s reading is still 90% correct — the section on scanning suppliers, the four buttons across the top, the worked example — but a paragraph in the middle about the new 🚫 No PO for this delivery flow is missing. She reads the rest in Italian, switches her pill to EN ▾ for two minutes to read the new paragraph, and switches back.

She never opens a settings page. She never picks “wiki language”. She picks her language once, the help drawer follows.

(Super admins only) Triggering a re-translation

If you are a super admin you’ll see one extra button at the bottom of every help page: 🌐 Translate to 4 languages (or 🌐 Re-translate (outdated) if the page you’re looking at has the ⚠️ outdated banner). Click it and the system will produce a fresh translation of the page into all four supported translation languages — Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Spanish — in about thirty seconds.

When to use it:

A help page was edited in English and you want to refresh the translations. The ⚠️ outdated banner is your prompt.
A help page was just created in English and the automatic background translation hasn’t fired yet. You want to push the translations out without waiting.
You proofread an existing translation and want to start over from a clean machine pass.

The cost per click is small (a couple of cents) so you don’t need to be precious about it, but it’s not free — don’t loop the button. One click translates all four languages in parallel.

After you click, a small panel appears at the bottom of the page with one row per language. A green dot means that language committed successfully; a red dot means that language’s translation failed (you’ll see the error and can click again to retry just by clicking the same button — the successful three won’t redo work, the failed one will be re-attempted). The committed translations show a link to the underlying commit in the platform’s source repository for verification.

The button is always visible to super admins, on every page, in every language view — but always re-translates from the canonical English source, so it doesn’t matter which language you happen to be reading when you click it.

Language Setting — where you activate languages for your venue and pick the primary
Multilingual fields — how the rest of the admin (menu items, descriptions, modifier labels) behaves when you switch languages
Editing a help page — the inline editor that proofreads existing translations or seeds new English pages